Column: The Natural View; Bush proposes selling national land in Utah
President Bush recently released his proposed budget for the 2007 fiscal year, introducing an unprecedented sale of public land. The proposal outlines the sale of more than 300,000 acres of national forest, 5,398 acres in Utah, with significant parcels in the Wasatch-Cache National Forest, including acreage near Cache Valley.
The money raised from the land sale would cover funding shortfalls in the Secure Rural School and Community Self Determination Act of 2000. This Act was the Bush Administration’s response to declining timber harvest revenues from our national forests.
Historically, a percentage of these timber revenues were transferred to rural counties to be used for schools and infrastructure. In the absence of adequate timber revenue, the 2000 act was meant to continue paying rural counties their same cash allowance from “other funding sources.”
Bush’s 2007 budget proposes to fund these payments to rural counties by selling National Forest land (and BLM land). This action would be historic for several reasons: most importantly, as the largest public land sale since Teddy Roosevelt created the current U.S. National Forest Service!
What will happen to this land? Most likely it will be sold to developers. The U.S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth recently identified the “loss of open space” as one of the “four threats” to our national forests.
Why would the Bush Administration go against the Forest Service’s own management conclusions and sell our cherished forest land to the highest bidder? Besides the obvious conclusion that the White House is plundering the public trust, the issue revolves around why timber revenue from our national forests has all but disappeared.
In the early 1990s, I had the opportunity to tag along on a flight with a grizzly bear biologist as he radio-tracked transplanted grizzlies throughout the Cabinet Wilderness and Kootenai National Forest in northwest Montana. As the plane roared over the Kootenai Forest, I saw what ground-dwelling eyes could not: a checkerboard of huge clear-cuts and sprawling logging roads extending as far as the eye could see in all directions. This ugly perspective exposed the reality behind five decades of intensive timber harvesting on our national forests.
But my aerial view was only a final snapshot in a long history of overuse.
During World War II and into the prosperous post-war years, Congress directed the Forest Service to increase timber sales to supply the war effort and post-war America’s construction boom. From the 1940s to the 1960s, everybody agreed on the U.S. Forest Service’s purpose: to provide as much timber as possible for America’s exploding growth.
However, in the early 1970s, a wave ecological and environmental awareness began to question the unrestrained harvesting that threatened wildlife, fisheries and water quality. As growth in America continued, people began using our national forests more as recreational destinations to escape the hustle and bustle. The Forest Service responded, and by the early 1990s, timber harvesting on public lands declined rapidly in favor of changing public values and better science-based forest management. Chief Bosworth stated that timber harvest levels on our national forests have fallen by 87 percent compared to the 1980s.
“But public demand for timber is still growing,” states Bosworth. How can we afford to cut so little timber on our national forests, while still experiencing growing demand for wood? Where is this wood coming from? The answer is two-fold. 1: The U.S. wood products market is now more reliant on private land timber, where owners can clear-cut marketable wood for short-term profit, exempt from the regulation applied to public lands. 2: Canada subsidizes its timber industry by offering timber sales to Canadian mills at below-market cost, allowing these mills to export cheaper wood products into the United States.
In other words, we still practice unsustainable forestry, we just moved the operation off our national forests. “Out of sight … out of mind,” explains Forest Service Chief Bosworth.
But the result of Canada’s timber subsidies created an unfair trade climate causing the closure of hundreds of U.S. lumber mills and putting thousands of U.S. workers out on the street. Adding insult to injury, the flood of cheaper Canadian wood into the U.S. market further devalued standing timber on U.S. public and private land.
The U.S.-Canada lumber trade dispute continues to rage on. Three months ago, Canadian officials successfully challenged the 16 percent tariff the United States had levied on Canadian softwood exports, dropping it to 8 percent. The Bush Administration realized timber revenues generated from national forests were likely to only decline further. The Bush Administration’s solution to governing challenges: auction off public wealth to the private sector.
Bush would prefer that you interpret his forest-land sale proposal as a necessary trade-off: selling small, “less-suitable” national forest acres to benefit rural Americans. Actually, Bush would prefer you didn’t know about it at all. But ultimately, the question is about sustainability.
The unrestrained timber harvesting on our national forests that delivered fat checks to rural economies in the “golden days” turned out to be unsustainable. Our trade imbalance with Canada? Unsustainable. Selling U.S. National Forest land? Unsustainable. And most importantly, the out-of-control U.S. demand for wood products? Unsustainable.
We can blame it all on the short-sighted Bush administration (a fun and easy sport), or we Americans can take responsibility for our vote and responsibility for consuming the majority of Earth’s resources.
More information about the proposed Forest Service land sale and what forest lands are eligible for sale can be found at: www.fs.fed.us.
Links to alternative building techniques: www.ecobuildnetwork.org,www.greenhomebuilding.com.
Comments can be sent to jmgoodell@cc.usu.edu.